Thinking Outside the Comic-Shop: Exposing Great Manga to Grown-Ups

(or “Can Manga Muster Up Its Maus / Watchmen Mega-Crossover Hit?”)

AX Alternative Manga Vol. 1
As a reader of Hooded Utilitarian, you’re probably a little like me: you spend so much time in the world of comics and manga, you’re a little weirded out when you remember that the vast majority of readers in America still think that “comics are for kids.” Why do you think there are still magazine / newspaper / TV news reporters who trot out that tired headline “Pow! Zap! Comics Aren’t For Kids Anymore?” It’s because it’s news to them that there are lots of comics (ahem, “graphic novels”) that are written by grown-ups, for grown-up sensibilities.

Even now, if I mention that I read graphic novels to my friends, co-workers, family members and acquaintances who are non-comics readers (there are a lot of them), only 1-in-5 (maybe 1-in-10) will mention that they’ve read and enjoyed a graphic novel. They’ll usually name-check Maus by Art Spiegelman, or maybe Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. But it’s extremely rare that I’ll hear a manga title mentioned in this short list of grown-up graphic novels that reach non-comics readers. That’s really a shame, because manga has a lot of variety, and a lot of original and fascinating stories to offer to readers who normally shy away from superhero fare.

MANGA ABOUT ALMOST ANYTHING FOR ALMOST EVERYONE

Moyasimon Vol. 1
I love lots of things about manga, but there’s one thing I especially love: it’s so incredibly diverse. There’s manga about almost any subject you can imagine. There’s manga written by and for men AND women. There are stories for adults, teens, tweens, girls and boys — almost any reader of any age, and about almost any subject under the sun. This year alone, I’ve read manga about:

  • Cats, dogs, fish, rabbits, dinosaurs
  • Cooking, wine, bacteria and fermentation
  • Basketball, football, ice skating, mountain climbing
  • Rock music, classical music, kabuki, acting, ballet
  • Fine art and fashion
  • Space exploration, astral projection, oceanography, medicine, religion
  • Autism, alcoholism, drug abuse, homelessness, serial killers
  • English maids, Spanish bullfighters, Turkish nomads
  • Gay, straight, cross-dressing, transgendered and transsexual characters
  • Single parents, office workers, soldiers, librarians, pastry chefs
  • …Even comics about making comics!

And that’s mostly just the manga I’ve read in English. If we open it up to manga that’s available in Japan, the variety of stories and styles is even greater.

Really great manga creators draw about subjects that they’re passionate about – and their enthusiasm, diverse art styles and points of view make their comics a joy to read. “Manga” is not a style – it’s a genre, just like “rock music” is a genre that can be expressed in a variety of ways for a variety of audiences.

So why do people have such a narrow perception of what manga is? As Ed Chavez mentioned in his essay, in Japan, “manga” just means “comics.” I say we need to think beyond that. In North America, calling manga “comics” limits a book’s appeal to  just comics readers. Calling it “comics” forces a book to try to overcome what mainstream book readers assume “comics” are – they think comics are kids stuff.

TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING: FIGHTING FOR COMICS FANS’ ATTENTION

GoGo Monster
If American comics have to deal with the “comics are for kids” stigma, imagine what manga has to endure. Not only does manga in America have to deal with the “kids stuff” label, it also has to fend off assumptions held by mainstream comic book readers.

“Manga? Isn’t that girly stuff?”
“Manga? What, like Pokemon?”
“Manga? I can’t read that backwards crap.”
“Manga? Nah, I’m not into tentacle porn.”

As things stand now, a lot of manga that’s published in the U.S. is geared to appeal to people who already “get”manga: the fans who watch anime, or have already been introduced to the joys of manga, via the classic”gateway drug” manga titles like Akira, Lone Wolf and Cub, Fruits Basket, Naruto, Death Note and Ranma ½. But by focusing on the already “converted,” are we missing out on an opportunity to reach out beyond the comics shop, the manga aisle or even the “graphic novels” section of the bookstore?

Where there was once only a handful of manga titles published in the U.S., there are now hundreds – and a lot of them are targeted at teen readers. As a result, a lot of teen manga fans are overloaded with choices. There’s so much great manga for them to choose from nowadays, they despair because they can’t afford to buy everything they want to read. So faced with so many desirable titles, what do budget-strapped manga readers do? Some (okay, lots of) fans download it for free by any means necessary (Erica Friedman dove into the scanlation issue in her essay for this roundtable).

Meanwhile, on the other side of the comics shop, a lot of diehard superhero comics fans have a hard enough time keeping up the various crises on Infinite Earths, Darkest Nights, Brightest Days and Marvel zombie invasions. Why would they invest their spare time sifting through the hundreds of similar-looking manga on the shelf to find one that they might enjoy reading, much less consider buying, with their already tapped-out comics-buying budget?

These clichés of comics fans have tons of manga / comics titles fighting for their attention and their dollars. So why bother trying so hard to sell “arty,” “indie” or “grown-up” manga to this crowd? I say think bigger – and think outside the comic shop.

LET GO OF LABELS THAT LIMIT MANGA’S APPEAL TO NEW READERS

To break out of the comic shop/manga aisle “walled garden”, we need to stop focusing on selling this kind of comics for grown-ups merely as “manga” (or “seinen manga,” “josei manga” or even “indie manga”). Clinging to Japanese classifications may give a diehard fan a degree of satisfaction that they know that a particular manga was published in XYZ magazine in Japan, but classifying a particular manga title as a “shojo,” “shonen,” or “seinen” title isn’t all that helpful to a reader who doesn’t understand Japanese; it just adds another potentially off-putting “code word” for new readers to decipher.

Using Japanese labels to describe a book tells new readers that they have to take Japanese lessons or earn their “otaku cred” before they’ll be allowed into the “manga clubhouse.” As Shaenon Garrity pointed out, and as Ryan Sands also mentioned in his essay, what we consider to be “indie” in the U.S. doesn’t always jibe with how Japanese readers perceive the same series anyway.

Emma Vol. 10
Trying to sell manga based on how they were sold in Japan can cut off worthwhile books from the readers who might potentially appreciate them most. For example: Emma by Kaoru Mori is an exquisitely-drawn, painstakingly-researched, beautifully-told historical romance. It was first published in Comics Beam, an eclectic “seinen” or “mens'” manga magazine. Based on its romantic storyline, Emma was marketed in the U.S. as a “shojo” or girl’s manga series. Naturally, its “girly” look and subject led a lot of “sophisticated” comics readers to turn up their nose at this series. Although it was submitted for consideration, it was snubbed for the 2010 Eisner Awards.

That’s a shame, because I’d argue that Kaoru Mori is probably right up there as one of the world’s true masters of graphic storytelling. Her ability to capture nuances of character, emotion and relationships with just a few strokes of her pen is astonishing. Mori’s current series Otoyomegatari (The Bride’s Stories), which is as yet unlicensed in the U.S., has one of the most stunning, heart-pounding hunting scenes I’ve ever seen in print.

Why should anyone who loves comics deny themselves the pleasure of reading such a wonderfully-drawn, masterfully-told story just because it looks “girly” or (gasp) just because they have a thing against what they think “manga” is?

EXPOSING MANGA TO NON-MANGA READERS

Breaking out of the mainstream mindset that “all manga is Naruto” requires savvy and imaginative marketing on the part of U.S. manga publishers.

Manga is incredibly diverse. Selling every manga title with a “one size fits all” approach to readers is a grave disservice to these comics, and it limits their potential readership. I know it’s time-consuming to do so, but it’s probably more effective to sell graphic novels to various types of readers based on the various titles’ individual art styles and subject matter.

If we can’t get new readers into the manga section, then it’s up to us, publishers and people who want to see more “grown-up” manga get the attention it deserves, to put manga in front of new readers by bringing manga to where these prospective readers are getting information now: non-comics magazines, newspapers, blogs, TV shows, radio shows – anywhere they turned on to new ideas. One way to do this is to focus on the subject and style of the manga, and as Brigid Alverson suggests in her essay, pitch these unconventional graphic novels to non-comics media outlets.

Real Vol. 8
While rare, several manga titles have gotten some attention from non-comics media:

  • Basketball manga by Takehiko Inoue (Real and Slam Dunk) was reviewed and Inoue was profiled in the L.A. Times during the Lakers – Celtics NBA Finals.
  • Kami no Shizuku (Drops of God) by Tadashi Agai (a.k.a. brother/sister team Yuko and Shin Kibayashi) has been written up in the New York Times, CNN and Decanter Magazine, and wine blogs. Alas, while it has been published in French, it’s not yet licensed in English.
  • Oishinbo has been featured in the pages of Bon Appetit, the food section in several newspapers and numerous food blogs.  As a result, I’ve seen Oishinbo sold at cooking specialty shops like Omnivore Books in San Francisco and Good Egg in Toronto. Seven volumes of Oishinbo, each focused on a different food, are available from VIZ Media.
  • LA Weekly columnist Liz Ohanesian regularly writes about anime and manga culture with a hip, street-smart voice and perspective that’s not just “otakus writing for otakus” – check out her fab article about former Bratmobile singer Alison Wolfe’s role in localizing Ai Yazawa’s rock ‘n’ roll drama, Nana.
  • Whitney Matheson, from USA Today’s Pop Candy blog gave a shoutout to Detroit Metal City, Kiminori Wakasugi’s crass, brash and outrageous heavy metal comedy – and even named it as one of the top 10 best graphic novels of 2009, along with A Drifting Life and Oishinbo
  • Summit of the Gods Volume 1

  • Summit of the Gods by Jiro Taniguchi, a manga about climbing Mount Everest got a nice write-up in Outside Magazine. (Available from Fanfare-Ponent Mon)
  • Section Chief Kosaku Shima, one of the most popular “business manga” titles in Japan was written up in The Economist. Unfortunately, only a few volumes of the Kodansha bilingual edition of this series is available in English.
  • With the Light by Keiko Tobe, a series from Yen Press about a young mother’s struggles to understand and raise her autistic son has been featured on a few autism-focused parenting blogs.
  • GoGo Monster by Taiyo Matsumoto (VIZ Media) was nominated for the L.A. Times Book Prize alongside Asterios Polyp, Scott Pilgrim, and Footnotes in Gaza.
  • Ooku by Fumi Yoshinaga (VIZ Media), won the 2009 James Tiptree Jr. Literary Award – an “annual literary prize for science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender.” Ooku certainly fit the bill, as it examines an alternate reality where most of Japan’s male population has succumbed to a mysterious plague, and the shogun is a woman.

Sex and the City by Erica Sakurazawa
Meanwhile in Japan, manga is featured in fashion magazines, alongside fashion photo spreads and celebrity interviews:

  • Manga creator Erica Sakurazawa (The Aromatic Bitters from TokyoPop) recently did a 6-page short story adapting the characters of Sex in the City as manga characters. This full-color comic was featured in the Japanese edition of Harper’s Bazaar as a showcase for both the Sex and the City 2 movie and the latest styles by Louis Vuitton, Prada and Versace.
  • Ai Yazawa’s Paradise Kiss (TokyoPop), a story about an aspiring model and fashion design students, was serialized in the pages of Zipper, a fashion magazine.

As Kate Dacey asked in her essay, why aren’t we doing more to reach the one audience that the U.S. comics industry has been ignoring or failing to reach for years: young women? If we can have manga versions of Twilight and Gossip Girl, why not Sex and the City comics? Why isn’t a series like Suppli, a series about the professional and romantic tribulations of a young woman working at an advertising agency reviewed or serialized  in Glamour or Marie Claire? Why not have Bunny Drop, a completely relatable series about a single father and his young adopted daughter discussed in parenting blogs or magazines? And what if (as Shaenon Garrity suggested in her essay) Oprah actually plugged a manga series on her show or magazine? The mind boggles.

WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO TAKE IT TO THE NEXT LEVEL?

Little Fluffy Gigolo Pelu Vol. 1
There are so many possibilities out there to explore. I’d love to see a regular columns about indie manga – or even have have manga featured more prominently in hip, artsy and pop-culture savvy magazines like Giant Robot, Hi-Fructose, Spin, Juxtapoz and VICE. Artistically edgy, smart and witty titles like Little Fluffy Gigolo Pelu (Last Gasp), AX: Alternative Manga (Top Shelf) and I’ll Give It My All… Tomorrow (VIZ Media) are all appealing choices for these magazines’ readers.

Websites like SigIkki.com make it easy for new readers to sample manga online before they buy them; it’s a painless way to turn new readers onto manga they might not ordinarily be exposed to. It can only get better as more manga is available for sampling and reading online or for download via eBook readers like the Kindle or iPad.

It’ll take a lot of effort and outreach to get to the point where we have a manga title that’s as widely read as Maus or Watchmen. It won’t be easy. Books like that achieve a high level of attention and acclaim because they have a rare combination of factors going for them:

  1. a great story that’s well-written,  enjoyable to read and accessible enough to captivate even non-manga/non-comics readers
  2. strong and consistent marketing support from publishers and creators
  3. lots of great word of mouth from readers.

One only needs to look at the attention and care that Drawn and Quarterly put into promoting the work of Yoshihiro Tatsumi to see how it could be done. There are lots of good reasons why A Drifting Life made it onto more “Best of 2009” lists than any other manga title put out last year (It’s just an amazing book, period) – but I’d have to say that D&Q’s thoughtful and consistent marketing efforts made a huge difference too.

I think that manga’s version of the Maus/Watchmen “cross-over hit” will happen eventually – but it won’t if we content ourselves with just promoting manga to the already converted.

Kami no Shizuku Vol. 12
I believe in putting my money where my mouth is, so on a 1:1 basis, I recommend manga to friends based on their interests.

  • I gave a copy of Kami no Shizuku to a sommelier pal (he actually heard about it from the Decanter article, and he found it to be completely fascinating).
  • I’ve given copies of Solanin, GoGo Monster and Children of the Sea to friends who normally just read “indie” comics (they’ve come back to me asking for more recommendations).
  • I’ve turned on girlfriends to Emma just by describing it as being like a Merchant-Ivory film, or similar to Jane Austen books.
  • I gave Moyasimon: Tales of Agriculture (Del Rey Manga) to a friend who is a technical editor who writes about waste-water management (she’s always asking me when the next volume will be coming out).
  • My cat-loving sister who hasn’t read a comic book since she stopped reading Archie comics 30 years ago is loving Chi’s Sweet Home by Konami Konata (Vertical).
  • And I’m pretty stoked at the reaction I’ve gotten when I’ve recommended Biomega to this particular friend.

So I’m doing my part – what are you doing to turn on new readers to manga that they might enjoy? Try it – you might be pleasantly surprised by the results.

______________
Update by Noah: The entire Komikusu roundtable is here.

19 thoughts on “Thinking Outside the Comic-Shop: Exposing Great Manga to Grown-Ups

  1. Maus and Watchmen are maybe interesting points of comparison, in that both of them were mid-career efforts by folks with a lot of cred and visibility in their niche before they had their biggest successes. There was an established track record on which to justify a promotional push. Their success was still surprising, but not by any means come-out-of-nowhere surprising.

    Both also had big names attached who could do promotion, in a way that is really difficult to do for Japanese creators, as discussed in an earlier thread.

  2. I still can’t believe no translations have been done of baseball manga. It seems a natural for the US. Perhaps Adachi’s work (like H2) just looks too old.

  3. I hope what I’m about to do doesn’t become a trend in the comments here, because it’s sideways at best to what the article’s talking about, but Maus and Watchmen weren’t really mid-career efforts (all three creators still had, at the present time, a good two and a half decades in front of them as creators, and tops a decade behind; Moore and Gibbons had been doing American mainstream work for a few years each, and only Moore had any real popularity heading into Watchmen), and certainly there’s no way anyone could have predicted or even imagined the enduring popularity of Maus and Watchmen in the mid-1980s. The bookstore market that has done so much to keep these works alive was barely there for comics at all back then. Those books didn’t just come out of nowhere — they basically went *to* nowhere and created…uh…a where.

    On point, this is a terrific article, but I’m a little staggered to see a POV that’s all about getting manga as widely read as American comics. It’s clear there’s a very wide subject matter spectrum when it comes to manga, much of which does not find the American audience it deserves…but the POV I’m accustomed to seeing is one that bemoans the way that manga seems so often to outperform American comics w/r/t an American readership. It seems that the bigger issue may be getting comics that aren’t fantasy-based out to any wider readership at all.

  4. Excellent analysis- visions of “Team Comics!” banners float in my head…

    Derik- One day North America will be ready for Touch by Adachi, and I will be a very happy person…

  5. I think there are plenty of titles that can be easily marketed outside of the core manga readers.
    When I was reviewing Slam Dunk, I noted that American comics largely ignore the sports genre, but Japan has quite a few sports manga. Sports fans like comics, too. And a manga like Slam Dunk explores the sport of basketball excellently.

    It fills other voids, too. We’ve already seen many people bemoaning the closing of CMX because it printed comics for young female readers. They’re not exactly targeted much in the American market.

    For a title like Emma, since you mentioned it…women who love romance novels, specifically women who read authors like Jane Austen (ah, you did say this a bit further down). Emma is perfect for them. My mother likes those sort of books, so I gave her the anime for Christmas. She’d probably enjoy the manga as well; too bad it will be out of print now that CMX is gone.

    Maybe, as reviewers, we should start making more connections to American comics in manga reviews? Like saying “If you like such and such comic, this manga is the same genre/has a similar feel/etc.” I write for a site that is focused on American comics, so I definitely should probably be doing more of this.

    For my part, there are a couple other writers at ComicAttack who read a bit of manga, but I’m easily the most knowledgeable. Some of them have come to me for personal suggestions or help finding something for a column, and I’m happy to say I have made successful suggestions. I hope when I’m writing that it’s easy for manga fans and non-manga fans to get the feel of the title.

    And as someone mentioned baseball manga…. There’s at least one. Viz has recently licensed Cross Game. Also, the Big Windup anime was licensed by FUNimation…though they dropped it after poor sales.

  6. Deb: Thanks for the tip! I was even aware of the Shonen Sunday site at all, let alone that they were publishing Adachi!

  7. !!!! More Adachi in English… you all have made my day, and November isn’t too far away… When Short Program originally came out through Viz, it was one of the first times I really pushed a comic on my friends, both because I thought the slice-of-life stories were both adorable and well-observed, and in the vain hope that buying more copies than I would normally and giving them away might eventually lead to more Adachi in English. Alas, it’s now how many years later?

  8. They seem to be double volumes too (based on price/page count). I’ve noticed TokyoPop is doing that too: the next Suppli is a double volume.

  9. Deb’s kind of an encyclopedia. I don’t really understand the twitter thing, but it’s my understanding that if you want news on all things manga, you should probably follow here there.

  10. The above comment is by Akihiro Moriguchi, who emailed me to say he represents a Japanese company distributing manga digitally. It’s kind of spam, but I’m inclined to leave it since it seems relevant to the discussion…

  11. I have to say, I’m annoyed with the iPhone/iPad-centric nature of all these digital comics projects. I want digital on the desktop (with a big screen!), I want digital on my Android phone (which won’t censor work).

  12. The Apple censorship is especially concerning for me as it seems to center so much around gay issues- there were several Journalista links in the past few weeks that were discussing the attempts of a yaoi publisher to water down one particular product enough to meet Apple’s “standards”… just crappy and retrogressive and very Big Brother.

  13. I agree. Apple’s stance on censoring “adult” content is problematic for the digital distribution of manga. As it is, several manga titles have been censored (in small and big ways) for publication in the U.S.

    I guess if that’s going to be Apple’s stance, then that’s where alternate platforms like Kindle or Digital Manga Publishing’s eManga rentals might fill in the gaps — or perhaps Japanese companies like Animate might do something similar, like they have with some yaoi titles. TokyoPop recently announced a deal where they’ll be doing some digital publishing with Zinio: http://www.Zinio.com/tokyopop

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  15. I’d heard that Emma was actually “secretly” CMX’s best selling title at one point, because it was picking up readers outside of the core manga reading audience. A lot of spinster book clubs seemed to really pick up on it (not doubt spurred on by curiousity at the title and setting).

    In fact, I probably read it from Deb herself in an old article she did.

    Kris, Emma is one of the few manga where I would side with the “manga is better than anime” crowd simply because the anime is unable to replicate the delicate etchings of Mori’s linework. And that sort of pseudo-engraved 19th century look accounts for much of the manga’s appeal.

  16. Thanks for leaving my comment.

    The reason arty marnga can”t be reached to the right reader is because of scaceness manga circulation.

    Once even in Japan, manga was childish thing for Adults. But around 60’s during Student Activism, intellectual collage student read Garo or Tezuka Osamu’s COM magazine. Then when they grew up, manga became something not only for child but adult.

    The key point is both magazine treat real life story around the time. Garo’s main story Kamui treat Class Struggle in ninjya story. Tezuka’s COM magazine feature his own philosophical Phenix about human life and death.

    These story proofed manga could treat real life problem like Joe Sacco’s or Parasyte by Hitoshi Iwaaki and its versatility.

    I know as Japanese, scanlation sites are flourished but who read these manga?
    To having adult accept manga, I think at least serious manga hit around collage students is needed.

    And you haven’t seen at all yet. There’s over 60,000 manga titles available in Japan.(from “2010 COMIC CATALOG)
    ttp://www.fukuya-shoten.jp/eshop3/itemList.php?talent=COMIC CATALOG

    If you know title like that, please let me know.
    oboretakyojin(at)gmail(dot)com

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